Tracking COVID-19

US Charts

Data available through: 2020-05-20

This data is downloaded from USA Facts CDC. This data requires formating the dates and calculating the new cases and deaths by day. USA Facts gets data by county on a daily basis, this is totaled to get values for each day for the entire US.

The American CDC links to USA Facts under Cases & Death by County. Although for the below maps data per state/county is not used, information on that level is used on the next tab when ploting maps.

I am restricted the charts to show values on March 15, 2020 and after. This is when preventative measures started to increase dramatically. In addition, given the small number of cases prior to this date caused great variability in the growth rate and has multiple instances where it’s NA or equal to infinity.

Total Cases and Total Deaths

These show the cumulative total of cases and deaths. These total values are important; however they are not helpful for figuring out whether the pandemic is slowing down or growing.

Growth Factor and New Cases

One important calculation is the growth factor, as outline in 3Blue1Brown’s youtube video on exponential growth . The growth rate is calculated as follows:

\[ \text{Growth Factor} = \frac{ \text{New-Cases}_N}{\text{New-Cases}_{N-1}} \] where \(N\) is a given day.

In order to see if the pandemic is slowing down, it is helpful to look at the growth factor and the daily new cases. For both these values; we want to see a decrease in values from day to day - which indicates that less people are getting sick. Recall that a growth factor less than 1 is a positive sign that the growth of cases is slowing down. Growth factor is directly related to new cases - if daily new cases goes now the growth factor is less than 1; if daily cases goes up the growth factor is greater than one. These two charts represent the same information in two differnt ways.

There can be a lot of variability in the daily points - this is due to many different variables. On variable is the availability of tests, cases will go down if there is scarcity of tests and rise dramatically when more tests become available. One way to help get a better sense over the overall trend is by smoothing the data.

New Deaths and Death Percentage

I also wanted to look at the dealth percentage which I calculated as the total number of deaths divided by the total number of cases for a given day.

Values for Past 14 Days

Date	Total Cases	New Cases	Growth Factor	Total Deaths	New Deaths	Death Percentage
Wed, May 20, 2020	1,541,010	22,329	1.08	92,260	1,501	5.987%
Tue, May 19, 2020	1,518,681	20,661	0.95	90,759	1,537	5.976%
Mon, May 18, 2020	1,498,020	21,651	1.17	89,222	1,021	5.956%
Sun, May 17, 2020	1,476,369	18,529	0.76	88,201	761	5.974%
Sat, May 16, 2020	1,457,840	24,524	0.98	87,440	1,081	5.998%
Fri, May 15, 2020	1,433,316	24,919	0.93	86,359	1,458	6.025%
Thu, May 14, 2020	1,408,397	26,855	1.3	84,901	1,774	6.028%
Wed, May 13, 2020	1,381,542	20,618	0.96	83,127	1,678	6.017%
Tue, May 12, 2020	1,360,924	21,509	1.21	81,449	1,637	5.985%
Mon, May 11, 2020	1,339,415	17,766	0.88	79,812	926	5.959%
Sun, May 10, 2020	1,321,649	20,140	0.79	78,886	840	5.969%
Sat, May 09, 2020	1,301,509	25,585	0.93	78,046	1,477	5.997%
Fri, May 08, 2020	1,275,924	27,381	1	76,569	1,659	6.001%
Thu, May 07, 2020	1,248,543	27,490	1.16	74,910	2,030	6.000%

State Maps of Growth Factor